Andy Skelton?

Yeehaw, it's another blog! I'll try and stick to topics relating to WordPress and Automattic, Inc. Of course, nothing here is edited or approved by Automattic or any other entity. These are my views. Your mileage may vary.

Language Of The Day

One feature that never seems to get enough developer attention is our blog ranking tool, Blogs Of The Day. We never publicized this URL but some people found it and blogged it so the pressure is on us to make it better. Even if you've never visited botd.wordpress.com, you see its work every time you load the home page or your dashboard on WordPress.com. BOTD is the program that ranks WordPress.com blogs and posts according to traffic and other factors.

Well, today we added the ability to filter those lists according to the language option set by each blog's administrator. (Clue: if you haven't set yours yet, do it now so we can list your blog with the correct language!) The top ten languages are listed in the sidebar. Clicking one will make that your preferred browsing language until you choose another or clear your cookies.

There are some limitations: per-language lists are not archived and cannot be searched, javascript and cookies are required because hard links to language lists are not yet published (though ?lang=xx works), and we are only listing the ten most popular languages (calculated from the number of recent posts in each language). (All languages are listed in order of traffic. The time to generate the lists is insignificant, so why not just do it?)

We'll get around to improving most of these things eventually! Oh, and about the visual style… if I had thought about colors or patterns for even one second, there would be no new features. "Pretty" ain't my bag, babe!

Interesting feature, and interesting comment by Idubya.
What about bilingual or multilingual blogs? I suspect it is the ‘admin’ language what counts?
For example, I blog in English and in Guarani… (no, I don’t. It is just an example!) and I have less than average traffic, would it be better for me to set my admin language as ‘Guarani’ to be at the top?